This is big

The NY Assembly finally cut through the moral morass and voted in favor of the marriage equality bill.



33 Senators of conscience voted to give every New Yorker the right to be legally, miserably unhappy. Marriage licenses could be handed out in as soon as 30 days. Get ready to start crashing the more tony gay weddings in the more swank hotels.


Happy LEON day.

LEON is NOEL spelled backwards. It is now six months until Christmas. Kids, you can take a quick check of the whole naughty/ nice thing and see how you are doing.

And who better to celebrate this day then birthday boy George Michael:



Speaking of Michaels - Michael Jackson has been moonwalking in Heaven for two years today. Death hasn't put a crimp in his record sales.


June 25, 1963 -
Dammit, I'm putting my foot down, one of the greatest films ever made, Federico Fellini's Otto e mezzo (8½), opened in the US, on this date.



Federico Fellini attached a note to himself below the camera's eyepiece which read, "Remember, this is a comedy."


June 25, 1982 -
(Once again, going out on a limb) the greatest dystopian Sci- Fi film, Blade Runner, opened on this date.



This was one of the first major films to be reissued years later in a "director's edition" in which the director was allowed to restore edited footage or otherwise make changes more closely reflecting his original vision.


June 25, 1993 -
Possibly the best Meg Ryan 'chick flick', Sleepless in Seattle, premiered on this date.



Believe it or not, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks only share approximately two minutes screen time together.


Today in History:
June 25, 1876 -
This is a little cautionary tale about pissing off the wrong people.

During the Battle of Little Big Horn, General George Armstrong Custer witnesses a large group of Indians fleeing their village, and decides to press his advantage. The cavalry officer shouts, "We've caught them napping, boys!" Then he splits his force of 210 men into three groups, in order to slaughter as many of the retreating noncombatants as possible. Which is right about the time Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse sweep in and kill the white men. Two days later, Custer's body is found amidst a cluster of 42 other corpses, the general entirely naked except for one boot, one sock, and an arrow stuck in his penis.



This is the native way a sending a very serious message.


Eric Arthur Blair was born on this day in 1903, in the Indian village of Motihari near the Nepalese border. His British father was an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. The family returned to England in 1907 so that young Eric could struggle and fail out of school. By 1921 he had returned to the subcontinent and joined the police in Burma. He spent five years with the Burmese police before returning to England to quit and struggle. He stayed in England for a year, then went to France to be poor.

Finally he returned to England and wrote a book about being poor in Paris but no one wanted to publish it. He told his mother to burn the book (she did not), then wrote a new one about being a policeman in Burma. It too was rejected by several publishers. Meanwhile, however, his mother had been sneaking around with the book she hadn't burned and had found a publisher for her son.



Upon submitting the final manuscript to the publisher, Blair decided that a book about being poor in Paris written by a middle-class servant of the British Empire might not look good, so he decided to write under a pen-name. The name he chose was George Orwell.



Later he wrote a book about the political frivolities of farm animals, and another one about a future that sucked (he later acknowledged that it would have been a cheerier book if he hadn't been dying of tuberculosis).



Finally he became a Famous Author and even a Great Writer, but by then he was dead, whatever his name was.


June 25, 1910 -
The Mann Act, sometimes known as the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, makes it a federal crime to convey or assist in transporting women across state lines for prostitution, debauchery, or "any other immoral purpose." Men convicted of this heinous (if vague) statute face up to five years and a $5,000 fine for each count. Penalties are doubled if the female is underage, but men and boys are apparently not covered. This is, by far, the biggest party pooper in legislative history.



Unless you're into guys.


June 25, 1938 -
Another classic Merry Melody cartoon, Have You Got Any Castles? was released on this date.




June 25, 1967 -
The first live, international, satellite television production (Our World) was broadcast on this date. Among the featured performers were opera singer Maria Callas and artist Pablo Picasso.



Oh yeah, and The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon and Graham Nash.


And on a personal note: After we got home from my daughter's graduation, my kids wanted to watch a movie. They decided on one of their favorites - The Princess Bride.



After we finished watching it, I checked my e-mails and found out that Peter Falk had died earlier in the day. Once again, isn't life strange.



And so it goes.